I am not voting for president in 2008.

This was not an easy decision, but all the candidates are flawed, at least if you believe in limited government, civil liberties, free markets, and a foreign policy far less bellicose than what we have today.

Take John McCain. He said during the New Hampshire primary that keeping troops in Iraq for 100 years would be fine. He supported retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that violated federal law by opening their networks to the National Security Agency. He voted for the Communications Decency Act, for restrictions on law-abiding citizens selling firearms at gun shows, and for the Real ID Act. And then there’s the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on political speech.

You’d hope that a Republican would at least be solid on taxes. McCain is not. On Internet taxes alone, in two of three votes I tabulated for a 2006 tech scorecard, McCain voted in the pro-tax direction. The broader scorecard from Americans for Tax Reform shows that McCain voted against the 2001 Bush tax cuts, against a permanent repeal of the death tax, and against the subsequent 2003 acceleration of the tax cuts. Those were arguably the three most important tax-related votes in the last decade.

Barack Obama has called for a complete withdrawal of American troops by a date certain and says in his platform that the date “would be the summer of 2010—more than 7 years after the war began.” But Obama appears to support other tenets of modern American foreign policy, including keeping troops in scores of foreign countries at American taxpayers’ expense and intervening on behalf of repressive regimes despised by their own peoples. Then there’s his position on taxes and regulation.

The Libertarians could have been fun this year. But they picked Bob Barr, who has spent his entire adult life agitating against small-L libertarian traditions and has acted bizarrely during portions of the campaign.

Plus, I now live in California, making my vote approximately as important as when I used to live in the Democratic stronghold of Washington, D.C. So on Nov. 4, I’ll be joining a majority of my fellow nonvoting Americans and actually doing something productive that day. 

Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent and senior writer for CNET and writes a weekly column titled “Other People’s Money” for CBS News.

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